A game hungry Elvis Costello offers a just right nostalgic retrospective of his life and his roots.

But he is above all a gleaming one-man entertainer who manages to tear down some of the biggest applause with four brand new songs.

The setting is nostalgic. A gigantic CRT TV of the 60s model represents the stage backdrop and show videos, pictures from Elvis Costello's childhood and old magazine covers, movie posters and other things that meant a lot to the 62-year-old singer and songwriter.But in recent years has also acted very much to look back and summarize Costello. His father, the musician Ross McManus as Costello borrowed both collection and very much of its look away, went away for more than six years ago. 2015 came the acclaimed autobiography "Unfaithful music & disappearing ink".

This tour, which ordvitsigt dubbed "Detour", can possibly be seen as a sort of soundtrack to the book. The anecdotes hails, including how parents met in a record store ( "I'm romantic about records Because I would not be here without them") and early Sweden tours ( 'in the public parks, where people drank with bothering fists " ).

And he picks up a track list that is far from a greatest hits set. We are treated to both neglected rarities super early "Poison Moon" and the wonderful Kinks-steaming the b-side "Ghost Train") to songs from the album Costello did with Allen Toussaint and The Roots. All lands are not perfect, but I like the attitude.

Not least, it will be the whole three songs from Costello's next big project, the musical "A face in the crowd" based on Elia Kazan's' 50s movie of the same name and will premiere later this year. "No Man's Woman" is a strong piano ballad and even the fictional advertising jingle for the miracle medicine Vitajex, played on the ukulele, tearing down huge cheers.

Costello sings "Alison" without a microphone, but otherwise switches between a blue wing and lots of guitars. Clawing wildly at his distorted red Fender Jazzmaster in "Pump it up" and become almost avant-garde when he samples herself in "Watching the Detectives".Above all, he is as game hungry and eager to give people value for money as the last time in Stockholm, the Rival five years ago. Initially, almost too much so, a personal favorite as "brilliant mistake" hardly suitable for this so bluntly hammering.But the vast majority of the nearly two and a half hour long show is one the most and feel pampered, yet again.To Costello makes all four concerts in Sweden this particular tour feels like a fluke.

My idols have varied with age and tastes but I have always remained faithful to Elvis. Costello, not the King of Memphis. It is a debt of adolescence that I owe to Philippe Maneuver, still him, always him. I love the first albums of Elvis to the madness but the one of which I will never separate, is "This Year's Model". Attractions are at their best and Nick Lowe's ultra dry production works wonders: everyone is in his place for the good of all. This disc is powerful, surly, acid, fine, punk without the circus and the pins. It's big, big, big.I never had the hope of seeing Costello in France and his previous hallucinating tour in Sweden (he was turning without a setlist but with a lottery wheel that chose his titles) had been canceled due to illness.

And then, last autumn, it was the return: three, four posters posed on the walls of Stockholm a weekend and a sale on the following Monday, sold out in an hour of time! Vincent Arquilière had warned me that with Elvis, things were going fast. It is not in the company of the Assayas family or the expert Gorin that I would applaud my idol of youth but with that which is more "My love is true" ...First impression: I will never see the Rolling Stones (sorry Philippe, on this chapter, we are irreconcilable) but I bathe for the first time in this old juice fans, here New Wave, wrinkled and fat, and mostly passed the other side. Like Elvis for that matter.It is finally the opportunity to penetrate this Göta Lejon in the thousand and one places, which releases its adaptation for the scene of "Bullets over Broadway" of Woody Allen to leave room for the other bigleux, whose spectacles Have also made fame.

Elvis played the card of the past, made things big and arranged on a stage cluttered with guitars, grand pianos and various accessories (megaphone, high colored chair) a gigantic TV in cardboard type year 60 which diffuses the clips of the said Elvis , Allowing us to recall all the avatars and disguises of Mr McManus (I had forgotten the hippie period with long hair and filthy beard with bimbo orchestra preppy intel, half-gourdasses half-bombs, the same kind that Jens Lekman will hire Later for his tours).

He disembarks on time, lights off to play "(Wait 'till) The end of the World" to the electric saturated with reverb and bottom the case. I had been warned.

I was expecting a recital for crossovers and elm, but Elvis plays with the electric fairy and if it is very commendable, we can only regret to hear his voice boosted mainly through the enclosures.

The light comes back on and we discover the Costello 2017 version, a mixture of Jean-Luc Godard and the fruit caricature of Louis Philippe ... at the basin level. What would not matter if Elvis did not wiggle the popotin incessantly and without shame. How does Diana Krall?In fact Elvis voluntarily makes tons, hits everything and leads his show like a stand-up amerloque, alternating improvisation in free wheeling and jokes not very well felt, a little too written we will say. May I be cursed over ten generations to dare to mock a little of one of the greatest songwriters the earth has ever worn, and especially of my idol.

That said, he has the following tracks: "Everyday I write the book", "Almost blue at the piano", "Accidents will happen" on the folk guitar with a dragging voice, an affected and worn hair (superb trademark, We are well), always a little behind the music, which creates a shift well felt, a precarious balance that makes us a little tremble but keeps us very attentive so everything seems really broken. Yet Elvis, agile as an old roguery matou, always falls on his paws at the moment of the refrain and does not lose his voice at the edge of the crack at the moment of the final "I Know". The class.

The whole show works on the same principle of re-improvised writing. Elvis is an old camelot broken in all maneuvers: he borrows a thousand Detour (s of the name of his tour) to remake us his musical biography. The merchandise stand is well equipped with copies of its memoirs published in 2015, "Unfaithful Music & Disapearing Ink" accompanied by the inevitable compilation, autographed or not. Besides, it is very good because it makes us want to plunge back into the pantagruelal career of Elvis and to fill our gaps, kind of listen, yes yes why not ?, this collaboration with ... The Roots. The evocation of the different years makes it possible to diffuse images on the enormous TV and to break incessantly the illusion of improvisation. We are entitled to the anecdote of the recordings with Allen Toussaint, with imitation of course, and Unlike golden limousine and voodoo broccoli ... Some moments sound a bit hollow but are negotiated with a lot of excuses by Elvis who sells us his future "musical", "A Face In the Crowd", more or less inspired by the story That Kazan adapted (very nice film, a little too little known, in passing).

He tries to draw us a few tears, while apologizing eh ("it is life"), while he tells us The story of his mutilated grandfather of war, become a musician on the transatlantic (boats, not folding). He entertains the gallery by gently mocking his father, a varietal singer, in his hippie period, by Peter Sellers in "What's New Pussycat" (or, he says, "Austin Powers for the younger" ). He tells us that younger Declan was trying to unscrew the television set to find his father used to the shows of the time. Anecdote that is worth his weight of peanuts, Costello father played "If I had a hammer" before Elisabeth II during The Royal Variety Performance of 1963, spectacle eclipsed, like the rest, by the performance of the "Twist And Shout" of the Beatles.

Meanwhile, he will have put the audience in his pocket by playing "Watching the detectives", with guitar loops, accelerated, hyper-violent, chopped, syncopated then, intense emotion, "Alison" acoustic guitar without microphone I drank whey in the velvet panties of the little Jesus and I appreciated each syllable. Obviously he has to play it every night and have more than enough of this old song but let me believe, please, as each of the spectators present that night, Played only for me and that was his first and last time. I saw the Grail pass in front of me, I did not ask what it was for the sinful King of the Americas but I drank it in small sips and I am saved. Amen. I will not forget "I Want You at the piano", stripped, ode anti Lennon, anti ode itself, whose lyrics delight us and freeze. The world's most beautiful anti-love song? We applauded this bitter-sweet wonder swallowed by strangling.

"Mystery Dance" inaugurates the reminders with an Elvis who comes out of the stage and returns after each title jumping, twisting like never, throwing pink headgear, jackets of bad tastes threaded for the pleasure of swinging and impostor scepter in hand . Before his return, the TV broadcasts this little jewel Pierre Tcherniaesque and we are conquered. Elvis is King. He had told us so, from the beginning. He plays "Pump it up", over-inflated version, in the TV that turns out to be a scene with curtains and finishes on a little lie "since I wrote it, I say to myself every year that it is more and more More true "and sings the song of Nick Lowe" (What's so funny about) Peace Love & Understanding. This is how to conclude perfectly two and a half hours of non-stop show, putting on pearls (ah I forgot "Shipbuilding" on the piano solo) and (some) slag, closing the loop of the family and musical history of a great little fellow Pop, truculent and elusive, a terribly gifted rogue.Hat (pink) down Mr. Costello.

With the help of Johanna, who knows better than anyone that teachers never told you anything but whiiiiiiiite lies.

[quoteI drank whey in the velvet panties of the little Jesus ][/quote]I might just try this line on Mrs. Sulky when she comes back from Birmingham tomorrow ! Obviously a reviewer who loves the sound of his own verbiage !